Keeping Up

April 4, 2007

I’ve written before about how many programmers’ failure to keep up with programming standards and innovations causes harm to our industry and wastes money. Well, we designers have to keep up as well, else similar problems arise.

* This article first appeared in .net magazine
no. 157. It has been slightly edited for publication here. *

In keeping up with our evolving environment and responsibilities we have
to think multi–dimensionally about our endeavor. As interactive designers
we’re designing user experience, which means that we have to consider
a host of interrelated issues. In addition to concerns about message,
composition, typography, and aesthetics, our baseline considerations must
also now include:

accessibility issues – both human and technological factors

the increasingly wide range of standard technologies used to access
the interface and the content

user habits and expectations

…balanced against client expectations and demands

information architecture

page dimensions and browser resolution

convergence trends for similar applications or functions and how they
affect our project’s design decisions

multi–step user task processes involving the interface

mid–process steps (alert boxes, confirmation messages, etc…)

underlying markup structure and semantics

interaction mechanisms (CSS, JavaScript, DOM manipulation, etc…)

technology choices for serving content (html, Flash, CSS, etc…)

copy: how things are textually communicated

brand message

the client’s related marketing efforts

marketplace conventions

…and more, all of which impact design decisions today. We’ve got to have
a clear understanding of all of these elements in order to allow the design
to do what it’s supposed to do: communicate appropriately and create the
right sort of user experience. And not just in the intended or expected
context, but in a host of possible contexts and environments. In order
to do this we need information on these contexts and environments.

Design is beholden to constraints that are often partially
defined or described by certain statistics, but design is not something
that occurs merely within a pre-defined groove. Rather, design is often
the machine that cuts the groove.

More and more there is information pertinent to these aforementioned
issues available to assist us in our design efforts. But we must know
where to find it, know how to make it relevant, and understand how not
to abuse it. Yes, statistics can be a poison pill if we neglect what is
arguably our first responsibility as interactive designers – to
be advocates and intuitive crafters of experience.

Design is an intuitive human endeavor, not merely the result of a congregation
of seemingly pertinent, seemingly objective information. These statistics
are important to designers as a guide, but must not be misused or relied
upon too heavily. It is a designer’s responsibility to first understand
statistics before incorporating them into a design process. We must be
practiced at seeing into the information statistics offer and we must
possess an appreciation of the context in which the information was collected.
And it’s usually prudent to also understand the culture and purpose of
those who gathered the information in the first place, because so–called
objective data is not always as pure and unaffected as it’s represented
to be.

As I’ve
observed before, design is not the realm of statisticians, but rather
the realm of competent, well–researched but intuitively creative
individuals. Design is beholden to constraints that are often partially
defined or described by certain statistics, but design is not something
that occurs merely within a pre-defined groove. Rather, design is often
the machine that cuts the groove.

It is sometimes best to go against what conventional wisdom would otherwise
dictate. It is sometimes best to make a move opposite to what statistics
seem to suggest is wise. These seemingly unintuitive choices are our responsibility
to understand and, sometimes, to champion. How do we gain this sort of
insight? Well, by being curious, being skeptical, and by paying attention.
To everything.

So when I say that designers have to keep up, I mean that in a holistic
sense. We have to keep up with the whole world, not just a narrow sliver
of it, in order to be effective designers. We have to keep up with the
whole world in order to understand how a wide variety of information and
concerns can best serve our purpose (…our purpose as designers serving
clients) and how it can pervert our purpose.

Education is not a first step in our profession. It is an ongoing process
that is a vital part of our profession every day of the week. Like programmers,
if we rely on our current grasp of the world, of our endeavor, and of
our professional landscape, we’re falling behind. Like programmers, we
have an obligation to keep up.